


Promise

by WitchyBee



Series: Esme Lavellan Oneshots [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Drabble, F/M, Gen, Trespasser Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:17:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4842143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WitchyBee/pseuds/WitchyBee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last word will be hers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promise

Dorian gives it twenty minutes before going through the eluvian after her.

They find the Inquisitor on her knees before another mirror, her marked hand held aloft as magic sparks from it uncontrollably. She doesn’t acknowledge their approach at all. It’s like she’s in a trance, eyes fixed on that mirror.

“Inquisitor?” Dorian asks, his voice gentle with forced calm, slowly crouching down beside her.

No response.

“Esme?” he tries again, concern and fear rising. It pains him to see his best friend in such a state. “Esme, can you hear me?”

Still nothing.

“It hurts!” Cole cries out abruptly. “Her hand’s heartbeat slows to a stop. I-I I don’t know how to help her!”

This sends Dorian into a panic. “Esmerelda, snap out of it!”

Fortunately, the Inquisitor does come around. Unfortunately, she screams as the magic crackling down her arm turns from its usual green to a sinister red. It flares brightly for several agonizing seconds before fading away. They all stare in powerless horror at what remains.

Esme’s left hand is completely gone, and the flesh all the way up to her elbow is black, as though charred. Dead tissue. What had that bloody elf done to her?

Dorian reaches out tentatively and brushes his fingers against her arm. The limb withers before their eyes, flaking off and blowing away in the wind like ash. Surprisingly, there is no blood. No jagged skin or exposed bone. There is just a smooth stump, as though she’d never had a left forearm at all.

“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” Cole offers in the wake of stunned silence. “But her heart…”

Esme shakily gets to her feet without warning and staggers toward the darkened, inactive eluvian. Her remaining fist strikes the glass. It does not shatter. Magic briefly ripples across its surface like a stone hitting still water, but only her knuckles are damaged.

“I may have been on my knees, but it was a promise,” Esme addresses the mirror. “Not a plea. Certainly not a prayer. Understand, Solas? A promise! Var lath vir suledin!”

She turns from the eluvian and heads back the way they’d come. The Inquisitor’s friends do the only thing they can do, what they have always done, and follow her.


End file.
